Earlier this year I created a series of “best of” posts. The idea was to wrangle the growing amount of posts here on the blog with a snapshot of articles I thought would be the most useful to others.

I released one of these for each year the blog has been live: 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. That managed to catch up on 230 articles and almost 300,000 (!) words.

After all, even though there’s an archive page and a site map, the WordPress blog structure makes it cumbersome to sift through endless columns of posts. It’s also helpful for me to plan sound effects recording, writing, and exploring creativity for the year ahead.

I plan to continue with this tradition by recapping a selection of posts on the last Wednesday of every year. So, today I’ll share a selection of articles picked from throughout 2015.

I remember the first time I stumbled upon Reddit. I was instantly hooked by the lively banter, range of discourse, comment voting, and the stunning breadth of discussion categories, also known as subreddits.

Reddit is a type of bulletin board system where users can submit and vote on article or comments. It is hugely popular. It is ranked 31 in worldwide search engine traffic. It only stands to reason that sooner or later audio folk would wander into Reddit and begin discussing field recording, sound effects, game audio, and more.

Today’s post explores a few popular areas where you can discuss your love of sound with other pros.

Field recording is a unique craft. It is practiced under very specific circumstances: field recording captures real sound effects beyond the controlled environment of a sound studio.

That makes field recording tricky to learn. I have mentioned in the past that some schools touch upon field recording in film and recording courses (article one, article two), as do actual field recording workshops. Generally, though, field recording is learned via exploration or apprenticeship. A dedicated, academic method of learning field recording has yet to emerge.

Of course, there’s a more immediate way to learn field recording: by reading. I’ve been collecting links to field recording books for some time. So, today’s article presents a resource for those of you that want to sit back and flip through a good book about the craft of field recording.